Halfway through their pained dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision blocking the Biden administration’s workplace Covid vaccine rule, the court’s three liberal justices made a glancing reference to a now-obscure case from 1981, American Textile Manufacturers Institute v. Donovan. It was one of the court’s first efforts to interpret the 1970 law that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

There surely was nothing casual about their citation to this case, once the stuff of headlines. Among the dissenters was Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s authority on administrative law, a subject that he taught for many years at Harvard Law School and that has never been more important, or contested, than it is today, as we see now in the court’s decision on the OSHA vaccine directive. At issue in the 1981 case was the validity of OSHA’s imposition of a new limit on textile workers’ exposure to cotton dust, a workplace hazard that causes serious lung disease. Upholding […]